Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

20TH CENTURY FOX / EVERETT COLLECTION

REALLY SOMETHING: Stiller in Mary

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
There's Something About Mary: Difficult as it may be to believe, movie critics are human, too. They share everyone's secret, primal need for jokes about bodily functions and cruel pet tricks, especially when they are as well-orchestrated as they were by the Farrelly brothers in their 1998 hit. Their outrages against common decency were balanced by their fundamental good nature. Maybe their people were doofuses, but they were also the always likable victims of their own klutziness.

Anatomy of a Murder: Or, for that matter almost any other Otto Preminger movie you'd care to name. His style was claustrophobic—lots of people jammed into tight spaces—and he had a sour view of people's infinite capacity for duplicitous behavior. But he was a master of dank melodramatics (see also Advise and Consent, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends) and most of his pictures ended on a forgiving note. Perhaps he was obliging the studio's demand for happy endings. Or maybe that touch of Austrian sentimentality that he never quite eradicated from his haughty, cultivated personality. Whatever. In any case, this is a brilliantly cast, bitingly cynical courtroom drama

Gun Crazy: A handsome young couple (John Dall and Peggy Ann Cummins) meet at a carnival, where they engage in a sharp-shooting contest. It's love at first (gun) sight. And soon they're off on a crime spree, which ends tragically. Written under a pseudonym by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and well-directed by the expert B picture craftsman, Joseph E. Lewis, this is, to be sure, a Bonnie and Clyde precursor. But it is as crisp, no nonsense melodrama, and as a pioneering study of America's curious passion for the sleek, shiny beauty of death-dealing objects, that it retains its hold on us, 56 years after it slipped on to the bottom of the bills in our long-lost (and sorely missed) neighborhood theaters.

The Incredible Shrinking Man: Out on his boat one day, a man gets dusted by atomic particles and starts—well, yes—shrinking. To infinitesimal size. Eventually he's fighting for his life against the family cat and a passing spider. Most '50s Sci-Fi movies were about common creatures attaining enormous proportions thanks to atomic misadventures, but this radical variation on that theme was (especially if you are a kid, eager to grow up, not down) scarier and more profound than the competitors. It is long past time for a cult to form around its director, Jack Arnold, an efficient maker of B Pictures (mainly Sci-Fi and westerns) whose imagination was always A plus.

Joe Versus the Volcano: There are people who think this film, written and directed by the fine playwright John Patrick Shanley, may be the worst big budget film of modern times. We beg to disagree. True, you don't expect to see Tom Hanks to appear in an expressionistically shot movie about premature death. Or volunteering to leap into a volcano to prevent its eruption. But and if you set aside the routine comic expectations its marketing encouraged, you may find yourself entranced by a movie that is utterly sui generis.